ABSTRACT
An unpleasant truth confronting the mental health professions is that psychotherapeutic care of the poor is markedly inadequate. In a major study of this problem, which found significantly higher incidence and prevalence of psychoses at the lowest socioeconomic level in New Haven, it is tersely put that the lowest socioeconomic stratum "needs help most, social and psychiatric and gets it least". The difficulty lies not merely in the inability of the underprivileged to pay for treatment or obtain it free of cost. One aspect of this paper is the presentation of a study of relationships between social class and personality characterizing patients in a midwestern mental hospital. These results will be compared with published reports about other patient groups and also about nonpatient populations. The comparison with "normal" samples is an additional test of class-character generalizations suggested by psychoanalytic theory, which by and large held that the abnormal is continuous with the normal.
